Chapter 1 Study Documents Impact of Poverty

The final report tracking students in the federal Chapter 1 program
demonstrates the negative impact poverty has on the children who live
in it--or even near it.

Low-income students generally start at a lower academic level than
others and only catch up through determined and well-planned efforts by
their principals, teachers, and parents, according to the $29 million
study of the largest federal program in K-12 education.

Even middle-class and high-income students who attend schools with
large numbers of impoverished students lag behind when measured against
their peers in wealthier areas and--like their disadvantaged
peers--fail to regain that ground in later years, the final version of
the federally financed study, released this month, points out.

But that does not mean the Chapter 1 remedial program--which has
since been revised and renamed Title I--was ineffective, the report's
authors and the program's supporters say.

"Limitations of this study do not allow us to determine whether
Chapter 1 students would have been academically worse off without the
assistance they received," the report says.

"There are just less goodies of a variety of sorts in schools
serving high concentrations of low-income families," said Andrew C.
Porter, the director of the Center for Education Research at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, who reviewed the data from the massive
report.

The Department of Education released the final version of the
"Prospects" longitudinal study of Chapter 1 after delivering copies to
Congress on April 4. The study tracked the progress of 40,000 students
over four years, making it possibly the biggest effort ever to track
impoverished students' academic progress.

Same Pace, Unequal Starts

The final report confirms the contents of its summary, which had
been circulating among education researchers and on Capitol Hill for
several weeks. It finds that Chapter 1 intervention failed to narrow
the learning gap between the students it served and those who didn't
participate in the program, which provides students with extra help in
reading and mathematics. ("Chapter 1
Aid Failed To Close Learning Gap," Apr. 2, 1997.)

Critics say the research is proof that the program has failed and it
should be radically overhauled, possibly to give parents vouchers to
pay for tutoring or select different schools for their children to
attend.

"It's been a federal subsidy of K-12 education," said Checker E.
Finn Jr., a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think
tank based in Indianapolis. "It has not been an effective
compensatory-education program for low-income kids."

But supporters say grants from the $7.2 billion Title I program are
vital to inner-city schools trying to raise student achievement.

"Title I is the only resource [high-poverty schools] have to do any
kind of restructuring or redesign," said Sam Stringfield, a principal
research scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the
lead author of a companion study to Prospects on successful attempts to
improve high-poverty schools. "If you're going to fix things, this is
the lever that's available. Everything else has failed. They failed
because they eventually went away."

In the mounds of Prospects data, researchers discovered that
students of all economic backgrounds learned at about the same pace.
But students in high-poverty schools started at a lower level and
rarely caught up, even if they received help from Chapter 1.

High-poverty schools put "disadvantaged students in double
jeopardy," the authors conclude. "School poverty depresses the scores
of all students in schools where at least half of the students are
eligible for [federally] subsidized lunch, and seriously depresses the
scores when over 75 percent of students live in low-income
households."

Students in high-poverty schools scored lower on all sections of
criterion-referenced reading and math exams, regardless of the
students' economic status. Those results were consistent across every
grade level and for every year of the testing.

While achievement in high-poverty schools lagged, the grades the
students there received did not.

The average A student in a poor area scored in the 36th percentile
on standardized math and reading tests--about the same level as C
students in low-poverty schools. In well-off schools, A students scored
in the 87th percentile in math and the 81st percentile in reading.

Even with Chapter 1, test scores at high-poverty schools trailed the
national norm at roughly the same pace during the testing cycles that
started with 1st, 3rd, and 7th graders in 1991, according to Abt
Associates of Bethesda, Md., which conducted the research under a
contract from the Education Department. Testing of students in the
lower grades continued for three additional years, and two more years
for the oldest children in the study.

Some Models Work

Because the mammoth study was unable to discern why the program, on
average, did not help its recipients learn, it "was a foolish thing to
have done," said Robert E. Slavin, a co-director of the Center for
Research on Education of Students Placed at Risk, based at Johns
Hopkins.

"The idea that there would be a massive impact [because of Chapter
1] runs up against a long history of research," including a similar but
smaller longitudinal study in the 1970s, Mr. Slavin said.

Mr. Slavin said he wished the Education Department had dedicated
more resources to Mr. Stringfield's companion study so it could have
done a more thorough review of what works in school buildings.

That study, "Urban and Suburban/Rural Special Strategies for
Educating Disadvantaged Children," delved deeply enough into 25 schools
to determine why some of them were successful.

It found that models of reform--such as Success for All, developed
by Mr. Slavin, and the Comer School Development Program from Yale
University--if implemented well, could close the learning gap between
low- and high-poverty schools.

Achievement in one Success for All school started below the average
high-poverty schools in the Prospects study. Over the next three years,
however, it jumped over the larger study's average, according to Mr.
Stringfield's findings. Two other schools using reform models did not
replicate their success, Mr. Stringfield found, but instead showed the
same "lock step" improvement as Prospects reported.

"There are some things out there that show some promise of working,"
Mr. Stringfield said. "Ten or 15 years ago, it was hard to make a case
for a list of reforms that could go in and help a school with high
poverty."

Lack of Specifics

Prospects, however, did not zero in on particular reforms.

High-poverty schools where students excelled created "a more orderly
school environment," the Chapter 1 report says. They had lower rates of
student and teacher mobility than failing schools. They also had fewer
student suspensions and expulsions than their struggling
counterparts.

But the authors warn that the sample of successful schools was too
small be scientifically reliable.

The question facing Title I now is whether changes Congress made to
it in 1994 will produce better results than its predecessor did. The
Education Department has started a review of the current program, but
it won't be as large as the Prospects study.

Several of 1994's revisions offer the "potential for change" for the
better, Mr. Slavin said.

One allows schools with poverty rates of 50 percent or more to
combine resources from Title I and other federal programs. The pool of
money can be dedicated to restructuring the whole school, not just
offering supplementary instruction the way Chapter I did.

"Making a reform plan rather than a remedial service plan is the
most promising way to go," Mr. Slavin said. But "there's nothing magic
about schoolwide projects. It depends what they are."